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In few areas are Russia’s and Ukraine’s divergent fortunes as evident as in naval armaments. Whereas the Russian Navy has overcome the malaise of the 1990s and went on to introduce new classes of warships, including state-of-the-art missile frigates, attack submarines, and the mysterious “Poseidon-carriers”, Ukraine has gone in the opposite direction. In spite of having begun in roughly the same shape and in possession of the Nikolayev Shipyard, where all manner of ships up to and including aircraft carriers were built. The never-finished Slava-class guided missile cruiser Ukraina that is still slowly disintegrating at that shipyard has come to symbolize not only the fate of Ukraine’s navy but the country itself.
The fleet’s flagship Hetman Sahaydachny, a former Soviet maritime border guard frigate, has seen considerable time underway in better times, even participating in multinational anti-piracy missions off the Horn of Africa. After 2014, its condition rapidly declined even though it nominally participated in Sea Breeze exercises with NATO as late as 2018. While it is currently officially being refitted with new electronic equipment and is scheduled to return to active service in 2021, the ship’s future is still in doubt. While there was some discussion concerning the construction of a squadron of 2,000 missile corvettes fitted with both Western and Ukrainian weapons and electronics, for understandable reasons that project never progressed very far. Ukraine and United States have reportedly held discussions on the acquisition of one or two Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates but, even if these elderly ships were to be transferred to Ukraine for free, the country would still face massive problems trying to crew and operate them, due to the systems and weapons not being compatible with anything else currently in use by Ukraine. Moreover, the Perries were designed as low-cost anti-submarine escorts for use in the Atlantic, and aren’t suitable for operations close to hostile coastlines where their weak anti-air and anti-surface weaponry becomes a liability.
Thus, the future of Ukraine’s navy as a blue-water force looks fairly bleak, with no modern vessels in service or projected for acquisition. That state of affairs appears to satisfy the official Kiev, under whose leadership the navy became more of a littoral, coastal force whose main areas of interest are offshore economic zones of the Black Sea and the efforts to control the Sea of Azov.
#Ukraine #BlackSea #UkrainianNavy
